Life in a Barrel

Introduction

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0:21Hey, it's Molly. Before this episode starts, I want to let you in on a little secret, which is that Radio Lab is doing an Ask Me Anything about our recent episode, Snail Sex Tape. So the AMA is going to be with myself and our producer, Mona Metgalker, who is like a snail expert, a snexpert. And you can ask us anything, how the episode got made, how we came up with the idea. Do snugs really exist? So come to the AMA on April 16th.

0:52Now, the catch is, in order to come, you need to be a member of the lab. So if you're not a member of the lab, go sign up now, fools, so you can come see us. Go to radiolab.org slash join, radiolab.org slash join. Use code snail so you get a discount on your first year of membership. And as a thank you for signing up right now, we will send you an enamel snail pin that we are about to drop. It's very cool.

1:22We all want it on our jean jackets.

1:26So I can't wait to see you April 16th.

Episode Introduction

1:28And until then, we have a really great episode for you today. It is a story Lulu and Latif reported back in 2022, all about the chaos and messiness of life. And I'm talking life with a capital L, like the kind that evolution gets involved in. So let's go listen. Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From WNYC.

2:02Rewind. Okay. So let me just, because I also don't entirely know what's going on. I'm Lulu Miller. I'm Latif Nasr. And we also have with us. Yeah. Producer Matt Kilty. We have three different pitches. Yeah. We're going to, you guys. Wow. We're doing three different things. Yeah. But mine's very little, but I need, you got to leave me 15 minutes. 15 minutes. Okay. And then, okay. A little context. A while back, the three of us found ourselves in a studio together because our editor, Sorin, he knew that we were independently working on these three different stories.

2:35It is. It's about like. Oh, so you don't know that, Lulu, you do know the stories or you don't know the stories? No. I don't know. And unbeknownst to us at the time, he decided that each of our stories pitted chaos versus order in a way that could upend some of our deepest beliefs about how life works. And so he wanted to just get us in the ring together. It's a cage match. It's a story cage match. Yeah. And we'll get to all that. But should I start? Latif has got story number one. All right. Okay.

Hendrik Schubert Story

3:05So we're starting at the University of Rostock in Germany. Yeah. The story started here in Rostock. With this ecology professor named Hendrik Schubert. Did I pronounce that right? Absolutely great. You got it. So back in the early 80s, Hendrik finishes his undergrad degree in ecology at Rostock, studies in a couple of different departments there, goes on to teach for a while at a different university. And then by chance, I got the professorship here in Rostock in my former department. He came back home. It was really by chance I never dreamed of.

3:36But the job was department chair. So basically now he was going to be the boss of his former teachers. Yes. Awkward. Yeah. It's kind of a funny dynamic, right? Anyway, one day he walks into this temperature-controlled lab that they have there, and he sees one of his old professors. Mentor of mine, Reinhard. Reinhard Herkloss. Yeah, my name is Reinhard Herkloss. And right next to Reinhard, he also sees, much to his surprise, I saw this barrel. A bright blue 100-liter barrel.

4:08Yeah, my barrel for my experiments. And Hendrik, Hendrik knew this barrel. When I was still a student and we had a practical course where we... Because as an undergrad, he had done this experiment with Reinhardt, where they had filled these barrels full of seawater. Brekish water from a lagoon of the Baltic Sea. And they were tweaking the nutrient levels just to watch how it would affect the, you know, tiny microorganisms living in the water. Like copper poles, zooplanktons. But it was a simple little experiment that had only lasted for two weeks.

4:41And now, you know, a decade later, Reinhardt still had that barrel, you know, just sitting there. So I asked Reinhardt, hey, what are you doing with this? And he taught me...

Reinhardt's Experiment

4:52So Reinhardt then tells him the story. So I can go back to the late 80s or... So a few months after the initial experiment in 1989, something unthinkable happened. The big jump in history.

5:07The Berlin Wall fell. The Berlin Wall fell. Rostock was in East Germany. And all of a sudden, it just felt like overnight, everything changed. The currency changed. The head of state changed. The university changed its name, its curriculum. Like, all these very specific things about Reinhardt's day-to-day life all of a sudden just changed. Yeah, it's the cultural shock. Cut to six months later, June 1990. In all the chaos, Reinhardt had totally forgotten about the barrels until one day, a colleague of his in his department

5:38wanted to do a different experiment. And so came to him and was like, hey, could you... It was just bugging him. Like, could you just get those barrels out of there? I was asked to remove these barrels for their own experiment. So he does it one by one. So he, like, takes the one, he, like, shimmies it over, he dumps it out. Empties the water and wash out the sediment. Takes the other one. So he's sort of doing that. And then he gets to the control barrel, which is the one in the experiment that they, you know, they had done nothing to. It was just sitting there under a light source, right?

6:08As a comparison for the other barrels where they were tweaking things. Okay. And, like, for some reason, he's about to tip it over and then he stops himself. And he's like, you know what? Let me just, like, take a little sample of this and look under a microscope and see what's actually, like, in this barrel. Is there still life in it or is it not in it? And so he looks at it and he's totally dumbstruck by what he sees. Sample filled with many, many organisms with zooplankton and algae and so on. I mean, he hadn't even touched this thing in months.

6:39Nobody had. I thought that there will be nothing, just more or less dead. But when he looks, he sees that it's not just alive, it's thriving. There's, like, tons of different species. So there are phytoplankton. These are, like, little plants and a lot of them are green. Zooplankton, which are basically, like, the animal-y type of plankton, some of which eat the phytoplankton, some of which eat the other zooplankton. And then there are bacteria, which are basically like the equivalent

7:10of the mushrooms or the whatever that are recycling the whole system.

Chaos in Nature

7:14Unwittingly, he had created a little natural world.

7:19Quick question and clarification. Did he create it or did he just preserve it? Yeah. I think it's like a semantic thing. That's what I love. Like, sure. So maybe he didn't create it, but he, like... He sustained it. He didn't sustain it because he didn't touch it. It just happened. It's like a thimble of ocean that he got and somehow this thimble of ocean is continuing to live. Okay. Cool. Okay. So also, when he sees that it's alive, part of the other reason that it excites him is that at that time,

7:50in the 80s and 90s, there was this kind of open question in the field of ecology about the natural course of an ecosystem. And I'm kind of like bastardizing the question in a way that I understand it. So like, but this is basically, I think, what it is. If you could just give an ecosystem the basic things it needs, right? Like sunlight and space and whatever, but there were no humans around to mess with it, you know, no comets, no earthquakes, no outside confounding factors.

8:21What would happen? What would that ecosystem do? Huh. Cool. Okay. And there's sort of two options here. You know, like it might be that all the creatures get, you know, to some certain population level and with a bit of eating one another and more being born over here. And then it basically stabilizes, you know, beyond the day-to-day up and downs. It basically is like a line in the end. Like a never-ending line of harmony. Yeah. Okay.

Elisa Beninka Explanation

8:47Or maybe would you see like more like a cycle? Like there would be more of one thing for a while and it would dominate for a while, but then it sort of crashes and because there's not enough of another thing for it to eat and then another thing takes over and then instead of like, like a, so in this case, instead of like a line, what you have is a circle. A circle of life. That's right. That's right. It's what Mufasa says in The Lion King, the circle of life. That's the song, right? So two options, line or circle, which are kind of just two flavors of balance.

9:17The prevailing view was when they are left alone, the nature tend to get balance. But here, in this barrel, Reinhardt thought, I have the perfect opportunity to answer this question. I've got an ecosystem that's totally untouched by humans and the species in that ecosystem are born, reproduce, and die at a super quick clip. So in just a few months time, I'll be able to see like

9:48hundreds of generations worth of transformation. And so he starts tracking how the various species are doing. Week after week, he's like interrupting Christmas with his family because he's like, I gotta go, sorry. Looking at and scrutinizing like a glass of water over and over and over again. And everyone's like, this is the most boring thing. Like even his colleagues who are like scientists who do boring other stuff. Gotta go check in on my stale water. Exactly. They are all like, this is like, they're like, what even is this experiment?

10:19But from another way, it's like, he is a god overseeing a tiny universe where he is watching it and it's like generations are passing in effectively the blink of an eye for him. And he's watching this like very dramatic story unfolding. But he's trying to figure out like what exactly is the shape of it? Like what is the plot? He's like, am I in a suspense movie? Am I in an apocalypse? That's exactly what's happening. And he can't figure it out

10:49because of what he is seeing? It's like a microbial Game of Thrones or something that he's like watching. Like the species that are there, they're booming, they're crashing.

11:02One type of creature could be the dominant species in the barrel for hundreds of generations and then just, it's a blip from then on. Like it just crashes and then it never comes back. It's like Rome rises, things are gonna be on top of the world forever and then the barbarians come in and they're like, oh, hell no. It's Germany now. Right, right, right. And he watches this play out in this barrel for over six years waiting for the harmony. Oh. And he just never.

11:33It never came? It never came. No line, no circle. In this nutshell of a small ecosystem, nature is chaos, chaos, chaos. What Reinhardt had discovered in this barrel was that this tiny ecosystem, when left to its own devices, was completely chaotic. So what does that mean mean? Like is that saying it's just booming and busting at random or does that mean... Well, so...

12:04First of all, maybe I should tell you a little bit about chaos. Please. Because for most of the people, chaos is just total random, but it's not. This is Elisa Beninka. I'm Elisa Beninka and I'm a theoretical ecologist. Reinhardt brought her in to analyze his data and she says the way to think about chaos is not whether it's random or not, but to what extent we can predict what's going to happen. So actually, chaos is a system which is high predictability on the short run,

12:34but cannot be predicted in the long term. And the weather is actually the best example for that. Meteorologists can do forecasts up to two weeks. After that, they're no better than you or I trying to predict the weather. And in the case of this barrel... Species could be predictable for around 15, 30 days. After that, you couldn't know who is going to be in advantage. So it's not like things are just happening completely randomly for no reason whatsoever. It's just that we...

13:05It's beyond us to see why things are happening or what's going to happen, which, to Reinhardt, suggested, there's no line. There's no circle. Like, harmonious, natural balance, that's all BS. Like, at any moment, the natural equivalent of the Berlin Wall could fall and just upend the whole system.

Hendrik's Reaction

13:36He told me, I never have seen a stable state. So when Hendrik, the student-turned-department chair, ran into Reinhardt and his barrel, Reinhardt told him about all of this data he collected. Sometimes I had a stable state for some weeks or even months, but then suddenly the system shifted again and I decided to follow up. And then, with, you know, the help of Elisa and others, Reinhardt gets his work published in Nature and, according to Hendrik, there was this immediate blowback

14:07from other, some other ecologists. Yes. Because it sort of thumbed its nose at this whole field of study, like... If this is true, why should we do any research anymore? If we're trying to bring a system back to order and you're saying there's no such order to begin with, what the hell are we even doing? Well, if there is chaos in nature, why do we do restoration or whatever? But, you know, Hendrik, he was also skeptical of the result for, you know, scientific reason. Because, you know, even if Reinhardt found chaos

14:39inside this one barrel... it doesn't mean that chaos is something mandatory. He showed that there might be chaos.

14:49Hendrik is like, I'm redoing this whole thing. Ah, really? Let's see what happens. So this time he repeats the experiment. Similar setup and improved setup. Try to control for all possible variability. To get our best, let's say... And... For a year, twice... With eight barrels this time, they scoop and measure, scoop and measure, scoop and measure... Et cetera. What did you and your colleagues find? We had signs of chaos

15:19in some of the vessels and in some of the compartments tested. So not all eight? Not all and not always the same. Like when there was chaos, it was playing out in different ways in the different barrels, which provides me at least with a little sigh of relief because in some ways it's saying like we still don't know. Or is it just now like a multiverse of chaos where we can't even tell if it's going to be chaotic or when it's going to be chaotic?

15:51Like I just see deeper, deeper, deeper chaos, which, you know, which, fine, I'm okay with. Really? Yeah. For me, it was... For me, reading about this study, I found it personally, I found it quite jarring. I think you really... I really wanted there to be like a hidden order to everything that is not about us, that has nothing to do with us, where things make sense.

16:15And for that not to be there, I think, is very unsettling. Like when we do conservation or restoration or whatever, it just feels like you'd be throwing your hands up. My thought was like if the order is gone, if there is no guaranteed harmony, that actually makes conservation work even more important. It's like if we don't intervene and protect the order, it's not guaranteed. Who cares about your choices if it's chaos anyway? If it's... Because your choices are... If there are things that are beyond your control that are gonna... That are gonna... ...screw it all anyway.

16:46It's like the idea of the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice. I don't think it does, which is terrifying. So what you... You have to fabricate a form of justice. And yeah, there's a pandemic... Wait, can I interrupt you? Yeah. Okay, write that version of The Lion King. See how many kids go to see that. Okay. Ready? Yeah, do it. Go, make the song. Elton John, go for it. Okay. Numanaya singing Numanaya. I'm very excited to hear what's coming next year. Numanaya singing Numanaya. Simba, based on the work

17:18as confirmed by Reinhardt, there is no delicate harmony awaiting you. And if you don't choose wisely and show respect to your fellow creatures and plants and bacteria and fungi, everything will die. The balance is not delicate. The balance is not there at all.

17:45And the song is not the circle of life. It's the giant abyss of no promises vortex of life. But then why are we going to watch any of the rest of the movie? Like, even if you're a lion king, your lion kingdom is going to, like the Roman Empire, it's going to crumble and fall. And like, who cares? I for sure think that's coming. I think we're probably out of here pretty soon. But let's make it decent for the other humans and creatures that will get to live

18:16in the short future. Sure. Yes. Okay, so that was round one of our chaos off. Yeah, so we're going to take a quick break and you can use that time to really ruminate on whether you believe chaos is totally empowering and great. Or has let all the air out of your spiritual balloon.

18:43And then when we come back round two, we've got another Smackdown, Order vs. Chaos, coming up from producer Matt Guilty.

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21:02This is our class. On This American Life, one thing we like is a good mystery. Sometimes about really big things, things you hear in the news. But most times, the little mysteries are the best. Our lost and found is currently filled with pants. I don't know, I've never seen this happen. I've got skirts, I've got shorts. Wait, this is true? This is true. Mysteries of every size each week. This American Life, wherever you get your podcasts.

21:33Lulu. Latif, Radiolab.

Matt's Story Introduction

21:36And we're back. With Matt. Okay, so my turn? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I see how these things go together because Latif has this little barrel ecosystem that was in chaos which is not totally random but it's like a weird wildly fluctuating thing. But I have a story that kind of like steps that up because we found a part of life, you could argue the most important part, where it looks like things are actually fully completely random.

22:07And I say we because Hello! Hi! Can you hear me, Heather? We can hear and see you. I reported this story out with our contributing editor, Heather Racky. Yes, yes, yes. And Heather actually first heard this story from this guy, Chris Hoff. Thank you, Heather. Who's a philosopher of science at Case Western Reserve University. Yeah. Chris, how did we come to the story? You kind of, you wrote me an email and said I have a great story for you. Yeah. You're like, I got a hell of a tale. Exactly. Crap in your seatbelt.

22:38Okay. So we're going back in time to some big collars. Cool music. Back to late 60s, early 70s and to this guy Professor Gould, the floor is yours. Stephen J. Gould. I want to start by presenting the basic argument in a somewhat abstract form. Maybe you've heard of him. Darwin, in fact, never said that. Oh, yeah. Oh, he's the greatest. He's one of the best science writers of all time. And his new book, Full House. Yeah, he wrote some big deal books. Mismeasure of Man is One. Right. Wrote a lot about evolution. The fundamental principles

23:08of Darwinian theory. A lot about the history of science. But before Gould was a public thinker, he was just a young man who really loved fossils. He had, like, the kind of classic moment where his dad took him to the American Museum of Natural History. When I was four or five. To haul dinosaurs. He sees the T-Rex. I remember standing under the Tyrannosaurus and a man sneezed. I thought the Tyrannosaurus had come to life. It was about to devour me,

23:38but at that moment of fear, I just let fascination creep in. He was, like, absolutely hooked. Oh, I didn't know that. That's cute. And Gould says, after that moment, this fascination with fossils just started to unlock all these questions. Questions like, why are we here on this Earth? What are we related to? How is the Earth built? What has its history been through time? What's been the pageant of change over this immense span of years?

24:08So Gould felt himself drawn to the field of paleontology. The study of fossils. But that actually became kind of a problem for him. Because paleontology was not really seen as, like, a real science. You don't really get to answer big, fun questions in paleontology. You kind of look at a lot of fossils. Yeah, Heather, you described it as stamp collecting. Yeah, I mean, this is the problem that Gould was attempting to confront. You know, if we're going to survive as a science, we need to find a way of contributing answers to

24:39important questions. So, in 1967, Gould gets his PhD. And he's immediately hired at Harvard. And then one day... This guy, Tom Schaaf, he's a paleontologist at the University of Chicago... Called up Gould, said he'd read some of his research, and he'd been wondering... If they could do anything really cool, basically, with computers and the fossil record. And Gould's like, oh, that could be something. So the fossil record is, like, everything we humans know about what existed before us. What allowed us

25:09to start thinking about evolution, it kind of became the foundation for Darwin. And for this guy Schaaf, he thought, well, maybe there's actually still something in there. And we could use these new powerful machines to pull it out and start answering some big important questions. Why are we here on this earth? And so Gould... What are we related to? ...was just like, yes. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so let's set the scene. It's like, 1972, Schaaf, Gould... Right, and they invite this guy, Dave Rout. Another paleontologist who had done

25:40these really cool studies. Looking at seashells and geometry. And then there's this fourth guy, Dan Simberloff. An ecologist who was really into, you know, mathematical modeling. So we got three paleontologists and an ecologist. By the way, it sounds like a beautiful beginning to a joke. Three paleontologists and ecologists and a computer walk into a bar. Yeah. Okay. It's the winter of 1972. These four guys go up to Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Where there's this sort of holy grail of fossil records. This fossil record of marine life. Marine invertebrates.

26:11What are we even talking about? Like shellfish or what? Yeah. Mollusks? Yeah, mollusks, ammonites. Oh, sure. Trilobites. Trilobites. Yeah, I mean... Your various bites. Yeah, stuff on the seafloor. And in this book for each species, it basically has... Where this first appears in the fossil record, where it disappears in the fossil record. So they grab this book, they go to a house somebody had... And then, they go to the computer. Take their big book out, they start entering all the data. Uh-huh. And then they're like, okay,

26:42what next? I mean, the problem... Okay, like, a computer needs... Like, you can't just say computer make a cool thing. You have to ask a computer a question. And you get the sense that they just did not know what question to ask the computer. They didn't have a good question to answer that evolutionary theorists would care about. So, like, for five days, they don't know what to do. And then, right before, it's like the last day,

27:12Ralph is like, what if we have the computer simulate evolution at random? And why would they do that? Well, because evolution, you know... Is not a random process. Right. Darwin established it's like, it's small incremental change over long periods of time.