good to welcome you to said and i'm so glad we're able to put this together and the books are really really good and i'm looking forward to talking to some about your writing and so for the last time we did a lot about the magazine and you're welcome very much to compensat particularly wanting everyone to know about if i could i'm going to hold it up here is called notes from the holocene a brief history of the future we want one and all to know about this i would want one and all to know it's a moderately written book that brings a great deal of understanding of crucial scientific understanding to the to the rd is the area that we're in a very very lively fashion and there's another book i want to let people know published by the same publisher it's called n dazzle gradually a takeoff on the emily dickinson poem that was written by co written by dorian our guest now and lynn margulis who is his mother there were to talk some about that very important writing both of the books you can hardly put down if you have an interest in the human condition in the evolution of technology and consciousness and so forth and dorian welcome really very very much so good to see you could you share a little bit of your own background personal background born and raised educational and we want to talk some of your scientific writing and then we're also going to say at the end like frosting on the cake you are also a sleight of hand magician extraordinary but could you talk a little bit about your own personal background and then we'll talk was just almost out of college famous literary agent named john brockman who had really become the science writing  the united states he was a he was the age of for gravity bates and all this i was over they had the wall and so he was always on the lookout for possible interesting scientists to generate popular books was hanging around and he said in the end he said yeah i want to you know he came in with a big pen pad and he said i want you to write a book on popular science and she said i can't do that that's you should talk to my x husband that know he said that's good why don't you why don't you write a book you could write a book about growing up with your father i said ok but i have to make it a lot because they split up when i was three asked actually was five but for some reason i had three of the formative years  as i told you on the phone told her write a brief conversation i could not put the book down and so was downright bowed out i know i know but i couldn't have doubted who started reading it really really good a major contribution that you do collaborated on and she's a noted  you know the permissive and you know that sort of thing in terms of encouraging people to investigate their own yeah i had i had definitely had intellectual stimulation emotionally maybe not at all as it may be a little more still then that would dialectic there because you know the german anglo german sort of towering is pretty you know spartan and i steer and severe and it works in so far as the children who are brought up in that setting kind to  be things considered better warriors and more able to battle but you know that to come to the cost of their own personal development i mean they have actual torture as tremendous they were considered part of normal german bad and he's crying in the room that he just leave him there now that's because that that was still considered a lineage you know that's still like within the realm of mr spock but if you think about it from the sort of alice miller perspective there's a sort of hidden cruelty there in that you know human needs to be held and tied and they will be they could be for having some existential freak out looking at the you know stationary mobile sure and maybe that you know they have takes might go back to people's notions of something that we would call human nature you got a thing or writing in dazzle about the nature of nature or the need that's the nature of nature of  generally even though it's in the textbooks now is that symbiosis is absolutely crucial to the evolution of species yet if you look through the history of time you find that the st organisms on the planet were different benefits but every animal cell in our body if you look at it genetically you can you can trace a genetic fingerprint back to perspiring bacteria that were around several harding and we have eduardo ponds that is kind of like you know he's us he's a sort of us vanished pop show host who specializes in science and he wrote a best seller in spain called the happiness trip that's  symbiosis oxford mother was called acquiring genomes and that showed that when you look at the actual evidence for the evolution of species although it's usually taught that gradually of the the tree of life does not just branch out it also and now is to most of the branches also come together and you can you can see stuff like that happening even the technological rom although technology is a biological species telescopes and take a picture of the shock wave only two hundred thousand years after that the might of that would be in a certain sense koran as a singularity a sort of beginning point in terms of the fact that all of this exist baghdad's we as we move forward and that the logical time that our ability to process to image the past becomes ever more acute so you're right if you you extrapolate you know radically at some point in a future we may have almost magic the psychology of perception and deception embedded in the practices by the hand magic to poke some of these questions and one thing that you realise in magic and the performance of it was a basically an anti intellectual feel you know it's like  girls and pianos and stage magic and stuff like that by conjuring up in is a lot of that plus it and it is a lot of understanding of how people come to conclusions and how they can be fooled and yeah and how has a component of deception because you're never seeing the whole thing you know you've got to back stage it was a home and we don't and scientists this applies to science do it as far as the big bang and everything's doubting this  we want to see the whole universe caper but if it is what happens is that you have either you have a secret cover i could like and what they cause to call the black arts i could have you know i could have a stage that was all black and then behind the behind  a black on black partition there might be you know a girl dressed like a rabbit or something and then you could hold the secret cobber and then she would appear by and she didn't appear she appears to appear she was already always there hand ever appear as it only appears to appear by the removal of a super cover and how that applies to thinking about these big questions that are on the absence of science while the not only applies to the idea that maybe you don't get existence appearing matter are two different things and it's not clear that consciousness can come from any bit of wrangling about with the bits of matter and that to me is another example of how this kind of very simple idea temperatures of the gradients of the things that it would emerge but how do we account for the fact that on this planet and your father worked so much and said so we're trying to find you know contact with life and so forth we haven't yet as far as i know side of you know people place where there's a lot of hydrogen is not on mars is not on venus is not a mercury it's on earth and it's mostly in a form of water and it's also and life we hydrogen and carbon compounds life consists of hydrogen core of life seems to be related to the fact that life of rose and environment were hybrid was more prevalent but through this tickle called process of metabolism keeping itself going sometimes called always making oneself we find that the whole surface of the planet is highlighted in red in a way that you do not see other evidence such as the fact that some of these these kinds of early putative it early organisms were very are in a class of what they call extremophiles are very resistant to extreme temperatures and pressures which it seems to be the sorts of conditions that prevailed in the early solar system so that's one of the avenues that people are looking at right now it could have to rescind and sort of this in the always very hot you know  all that now we've got life so now we come up to where they're going to understand the evolutionary process by which all of the guy i related into related world as immersion so forth that's something you've taken a great deal into thermodynamics you w snyder and the more dynamic maybe you could talk some about the evolutionary process of the so by which we arrive at this studio talking to one of the question is the shoes evolution university of chicago less you know about that the number one we didn't have the book into the cool was a really serious blowing out of road large parts of it and i think you missed neither on that also but a little down so we'd like to do a more popular version of it by the as that they directly belong to a class of complex systems when you look at the real world the complex systems that you see are not generated by you know laptop computer programs  reduce gradients to spread anarchy because that people get confused about the nd law and you know it has something to do directly with the promotion of disorder or chaos in fact the basic idea of a it's just a difference across the difference as measurable so you got it appearing in the atmosphere between a high and a low pressure mass a very complex system that if you were alive if you were theological and you were on the lookout for evidence of a tornado the function is to reduce this preexisting difference and this is perfectly in accord with the nd it was a mandate to produce an answer free to spread an energy and to reduce grady is however so doing it forms a complex system the cause plex system is better able to get rid of the preexisting differences than that just any kind of random system so i might be indications oh right itself these are naturally complex systems on the way to life that are maintaining their complex that he in a primitive fashion but possibly on the way to life in the same way that the tornadoes grow  measured calvin or something and the fact that these things are somehow dealt with in the end it makes for an argument because you like james lovelock and the idea of god and the idea that there's an organic major to the existence of this planet but anyway it's a sort of gestalt and city that has a physiology because if you look at the calico nature of the atmosphere there's no way that it should be that you should have hydrogen rich like combination with oxygen rich oxygen that you do on a continuous scale for millions and millions and billions and also if you look at the evidence in the fossil record for life it's adjusting to life only does not exist between itself between freezing and boiling at the surface of the temperature of the earth the mean time to the earth has persisted within a very narrow range despite the fact that in evolution of among scientists or is it still thought of as something that is beyond the pale of what could be accepted in terms of the scientific process confined to the method by a lot of scientists to do now want to  kneejerk reaction on the other hand the research programs in these biology and geology programs often are very deeply influenced even if they don't necessarily know it by this attaches to the biological component of geological he would look at all the things going on thermodynamics over and he would have to be is he put it i would cast about for a function is there is there a function or a purpose let's just use a word it's a loaded word a purpose to the biological process any indicated the whole biological evolutionary process to which we are part and so more than taking the measure of the universe thirteen billion seven hundred million years ago and so forth is a pound is an technological extensions of consciousness the fiber developments and the geo political reality that we now have a system with weapons systems that can destroy the whole species or perhaps create a new condition out of the evolutionary pattern that is qualit another of another species that doesn't it doesn't make what most of them don't i mean i mean if we there we either go extinct we really are we're going to split off into a new on being that's what happened we come to the end of time i'm sorry we've come to the end