What Turns Sand Into Cells? How Nonliving Matter Becomes Alive

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.

You can listen to What Turns Sand Into Cells? How Nonliving Matter Becomes Alive online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

What Turns Sand Into Cells? How Nonliving Matter Becomes Alive is an episode from The Michael Shermer Show by Michael Shermer.

This episode is 01:27:13 long.

This episode was published on Apr 8, 2026.

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