Not too long ago I was interviewed for episode of the radio show Radiolab. Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich led me to a windowless cubicle where they then grilled me for a long, long time. From that interrogation, they produce a medley in which I say:
“Sloppy, sloppy, noisy, chaos, jumble, chance, sloppy, sloppy…”
Fortunately, they also saved a little more of our conversation, which was on a topic near and dear to my heart: the noisiness of life. It’s a subject I discuss at some length in my book Microcosm (ahem–paperback coming out on July 14–ahem). To wit: if you think that down at the level of molecules and atoms our bodies are just regular clock-like devices that go tick-tock-tick-tock, you’d be wrong. It’s a sloppy, noisy process, out of which it’s amazing that the regularities and predictabilities of our lives emerge.
The episode that Jad and Robert produced, called “Stochasticity,” (listen here) looks at the many roles chance plays in our life–from the level of cells, where I tend to lurk, to the myth of the hot hand in basketball.
Of course, like any self-absorbed starlet, I must say now that some of my best work was left behind on the cutting-room floor, or at least inside somebody’s hard drive. It was inevitable, given how cool and multi-faceted the mystery of biological noise can be. For example, I talk about noise filters on Radiolab, but I didn’t talk about one of the most important ones, which keeps signals clear in in our brains. If you want to read more, check out this piece I wrote last year for Wired. And I also didn’t get to explain that noise isn’t just something to get rid of, just an unalloyed bad thing. In fact, life has evolved to use noise to its advantage. Even E. coli knows how to play the odds like a skilled gambler, as I explained last year in the New York Times.
And if you want to head straight for the scientific literature behind this story, a great place to start is with the wonderfully-named 2008 review, “Nature, Nurture, or Chance: Stochastic Gene Expression and Its Consequences” (pdf at author’s site)
[Image: jaxpix on Flickr, via Creative Commons Licence]
June 16th, 2009 at 11:15 am
Yay! Two of my favorite things colliding: the loom and radiolab. What a pleasant surprise.
June 16th, 2009 at 10:57 pm
The Wired and New York Times pieces you linked to were brilliant, like the best things I’ve read in the last 6 months! I was really interested by the E-coli one in particular, because it reminded me of a lot of the things I learned about in Biochem but never really put into context or gave much thought to.
It’s easy sometimes to think of bacteria and molecules as little machines that always behave one way – but when you start getting down to the molecular scale of life, things are always bumping around and making temporary connections – it just looks uniform because usually we observe the average of billions of events in a test-tube or on agar. Really enjoyed that post. I’d love to write one of my own sometime in the future and link to those articles, if you don’t mind.
June 17th, 2009 at 6:31 am
[...] Carl Zimmer has a wonderful segment on the episode as well, where talks about the useful [...]
June 19th, 2009 at 10:24 pm
This seems an appropraite place to suggest reading “Into the Cool”, another take on life and bumping into things.
June 21st, 2009 at 11:42 pm
Here’s another review worth reading along the same lines, about stochastic resonance in biology: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000348