361 | Bonnie Bassler on How Bacteria Talk and Work Together

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. As I am recording this, I just this week Finally sent in the manuscript to my publisher for book three of the biggest ideas in the universe called Complexity and Emergence. I do apologize to everyone who's been waiting for this book. Um I'm not exactly sure when it's gonna come out. I'll I'll let you know when when I do. It was supposed to come out around now, but that didn't happen since I've obviously I was very late getting in the actual book. But uh it is gonna come out. That is the good news. And so it's on my mind all of these issues of complexity and emergence. I've been writing about them quite a bit. And the last chapter, you know, the culmination of the book is on complexity, and a lot of that is about self-organization in different kinds of systems where you have a bunch of little things, whether they're cells or ants or birds or human beings or whatever, which have their individual motivations and dynamics and ways of thinking about what they do, and they come together to form something a little bit

Unanticipated. Of course, anyone who thinks about emergence and complexity knows that it's very difficult to define exactly what you mean by unanticipated in those contexts, but more is different is the motto that is usually thrown around here, coined by uh physicist Philip Anderson. And the idea that as a system, whether it's an ant colony or, you know, sand in a sandpile, uh, you can get behavior at the collective level that you would not have thought of just by thinking about the individual units that are coming together. And so I felt like in writing this, it's a topic that I've known I know quite a bit about, but not nearly as much as one could, because it's a sprawling gigantic topic. And I felt that very, very strongly while writing about it. Like the things that I did say in that chapter, which again is the culmination of the book. I loved, you know, I liked everything I said, uh, but you know, you had to make choices about what to exclude, what kind of arbitrary classifications to invent to make this sprawling landscape of possibilities more coherent, et cetera. We'll see how that goes over. I'm thinking about this and saying this right now because today's podcast is a classic example of self-organization and one that I was not able to include in the book, even though I had really thought about it.

The units in question are bacteria, so just about the simplest living organisms that you can imagine. And nevertheless, they have enough complexity to come together in interesting ways and do things as a collective that you wouldn't have guessed they were going to do as individual cell. And the mechanism for them doing this is something callum sensing. Quorum sensing was discovered back in the nineteen seventies uh by Woody Hastings and other people. But the world's expert in quorum sensing is Bonnie Bassler, who is our guest today. Bonnie was really the one starting in the nineteen nineties who explained, discovered, and then explained to the rest of us how quorum sensing.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (76 minutes, 13,420 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.