020: Chris Kempes
Chris Kempes is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is a mathematical biologist, who works on scaling laws, and is ultimately interested in where those scaling laws break down. What are their limits? What is the physiological constraint for life on earth? How small can life be? How big? How might that constraint change in other environments?
He recently published a paper, along with David Krakauer, titled “The Multiple Paths to Multiple Life” that attempts to reconfigure how we think about life forms, and life origins events.
We discuss this provocative proposal at length, along with the scaling research described above, before we shift to our venture into the Zone to pursue a totally disgusting but revelatory artifact, if we can even call it that.
Learn more about everything referenced in this episode by clicking the links below:
Allometric scaling of production and life-history variation in vascular plants, by West, Enquist, Brown and Charnov.
A related lecture by Geoffrey West
Atlantis Dispatch 009, in which we contemplate cultural origins...
Past related ACS episodes - Heather Graham and Cole Mathis on what Chris calls “Chemical Complexity.”
Their co-authored paper, Identifying molecules as biosignatures with assembly theory and mass spectrometry.