#123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness

Manolis Kellis is a professor at MIT and head of the MIT Computational Biology Group. Please check out our sponsors to get a discount and to support this podcast: – Public Goods: https://publicgoods.com/lex and use code LEX – Magic Spoon: https://magicspoon.com/lex link & using code LEX at checkout – ExpressVPN: https://www.expressvpn.com/lexpod Lex Fridman Podcast survey mentioned in the intro: https://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/5833660/Lex-Fridman-Podcast-Survey If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/podcast or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon. Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. OUTLINE: 00:00 – Introduction 06:20 – Epigenome 10:28 – Evolution 15:26 – Neanderthals 27:15 – Origin of life on Earth 43:44 – Life is a fight against physics 49:56 – Life as a set of transformations 51:35 – Time scales 1:00:31 – Transformations of ideas in human civilization 1:05:19 – Life is more than a rat race 1:13:18 – Life sucks sometimes and that’s okay 1:30:16 – Getting older 1:36:21 – The best of MIT 1:49:01 – Poem 1: The Snow 2:01:52 – Love 2:06:16 – Poem 2: The Tide Waters